MOSCOW, July 8 (RIA Novosti) - Proton collisions...

"We are not planning to begin proton collisions this summer," said Mikhail Kirsanov, a senior researcher at the Russian Institute for Nuclear Research, which is part of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project to investigate high energy particles and the beginning of the universe.

Some media sources have reported that the LHC may start "smashing atoms" as early as this week, and previous reports speculated that such collisions could create a black hole that would consume the Earth.

"We still have to cool down the accelerator and conduct some test-runs of proton beams around the accelerator ring," Kirsanov said. "No one can predict a certain date [for the start of the collisions]."

LHC is a particle accelerator that will collide opposing beams of protons together to explore the validity and limitations of the highly successful current theoretical picture for particle physics.

The $5.8 billion international project at the European Organization for Nuclear

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